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I highly recommend this article, especially for those working with young adults. Links to data based reports about what young people can do to change their status — in either direction or stay put — economically. What they choose in those critical years makes all the difference. Below is one paragraph. The link to the entire post below that.

But I want to call attention to factors beyond programs that invest in human capital. In our 2009 book Creating an Opportunity Society, my Brookings colleague Isabel Sawhill and I conducted an analysis based on Census Bureau data on a representative sample of Americans. We asked the data to tell us how adult Americans were doing if they followed three elementary norms of growing up in a modern society: finish high school, get a full-time job, and wait until age 21 and get married before having children. The results were astounding: young adults who followed all three norms had a 2 percent chance of winding up in poverty and a 74 percent chance of winding up in the middle class defined as earning roughly $50,000 or more. By contrast, young adults who violated all three norms had a 76 percent chance of winding up in poverty and a 7 percent chance of winding up in the middle class.